Class of 2013 grads poised to flood job market: Will dreams get dashed, or are fortunes rising?

There’s no two ways about it. The Great Recession and the anemic recovery have been especially brutal on younger workers. The blue skies and sunny smiles of May graduations often turn to soured realities of menial jobs unrelated to college majors and mounting student loan debts.

But is the labor market log jam that locked out so many recent college grads from launching careers finally starting to break?

Consider some recent good news for a change:

The Bethlehem-based National Association of Colleges and Employers found that the average starting salary for new college graduates earning bachelor’s degrees increased a healthy 5.3 percent over last year. This, according to the group’s April salary survey.

Read More: Top salaries by major.

Billed as the first look at starting salaries for the Class of 2013, the survey found that the average starting salary for these college graduates stands at $44,928, up from the 2012 average salary of $42,666.

“The sizable gains in several disciplines—particularly in health sciences and business—have helped to drive up the average starting salary for the Class of 2013,” explains Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director.

Not all college degrees are created equally when it comes to the salary survey.

With a whopping increase of 9.4 percent, health sciences garnered the highest increase among the disciplines. This jump brings the average starting salary for these graduates to $49,713. Business also saw a solid gain—7.1 percent—bumping the average salary for these grads to $54,234, the association reported.

Likewise, education and computer science saw ample increases. The average starting salary for education majors climbed 5.1 percent to $40,480, while the average salary for computer science majors jumped to $59,977, 4.3 percent higher than last year.

Engineering: 4.0 percent, to $62,535; communications: 3.8 percent, to $43,145; and math and sciences: 3.1 percent, to $42,724 -- all seeing increases that exceeded 3 percent.

At the other end of the salary spectrum, graduates with degrees in humanities and social sciences lagged badly, with just a gain of just 1.9 percent, to $37,058.

All this talk of salary increases presupposes a grad’s ability to land a job within his or her major in the first place.

On this front, especially, the news for the Class of 2013 remains grim.

In a corresponding hiring outlook survey, the association said employers reported hiring plans that were mostly flat when it came to offering jobs to the Class of 2013.

Overall, employers taking part in the spring survey said they would hire 2.1 percent more new college grads from the Class of 2013, than they hired from the Class of 2012. That’s down from the 13 percent increase that employers had projected in the fall of 2012.

And perhaps most troubling, a full one-third of respondents reported plans to hire fewer new grads than they did a year ago.

“The new projection is consistent with recent job reports that show job growth is less than anticipated,” says NACE's Mackes.

And there’s the rub: Any news of salary spikes for the Class of 2013 grads is soured by the continued scarcity of actual jobs.

Thus, the Depression-like unemployment and under-employment situation among our nation’s younger workers and recent college grads looks to linger still.

Despite the pomp and circumstance and optimism and euphoria of graduation, many May grads might not make it off their launching pads for some time to come. That’s the shame of it, but it’s what the numbers say.

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